I am playing keyboards in a pit orchestra for an upcoming musical. I would like to be able to dedicate one synth to playing sound effects and “single-shot” effects like harp glissandi. I want to have each key on this synth trigger a different sound. I do *not* want to go the route of having all the samples “on board” that synth – I want to use a MIDI controller rather than a sampler synth. I can also use a laptop

I’m told that Ableton Live can do this, but I already have SONAR and don’t want to buy another recording studio program just to be able to trigger samples at the stroke of a key. Is there another program that can do this? (load all the samples into the laptop’s ram, assign them to MIDI notes, and it’s ready to go!)

Or should I get one of those handy 16-pad modules? (But there will be more than 16 samples… how long will it take to reload the next bank of sounds?)

While it can be as powerful as using a camera to detect movement and tie into musical events, or even use mechanical switches for the same, you can ‘simply’ use a software object to listen for a note and trigger a series. Because it’s a graphical tool like Ableton, it’s very intuitive. Unlike Ableton, it was developed for Mac OS so it’s a lot more elegant for all it’s complex functions. Enjoy.